GEP SMART vs SAP Ariba Procurement comparison

GEP Worldwide and SAP are both solutions in the Procurement Software category. GEP Worldwide is ranked #3, while SAP is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.2. GEP Worldwide holds a 6.8% mindshare in PS, compared to SAP’s 25.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of GEP Worldwide users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of SAP users who would recommend it.

GEP SMART

Read 13 GEP SMART reviews

1,393 Views
1,198 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SAP Ariba Procurement

Read 12 SAP Ariba Procurement reviews

2,139 Views
2,139 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

GEP SMART

SAP Ariba Procurement

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between GEP SMART and SAP Ariba Procurement based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Procurement Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement

September 2025

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Helped 868,759 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

GEP SMART

Ranking in Procurement Software

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Contract Management Software (10th)

SAP Ariba Procurement

Ranking in Procurement Software

1st

Average Rating

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Procurement Software category, the mindshare of GEP SMART is 6.8%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Ariba Procurement is 25.0%, down from 25.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Procurement Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
SAP Ariba Procurement	25.0%
GEP SMART	6.8%
Other	68.2%

Procurement Software

Featured Reviews

ChristinaJones

Senior Product Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees

Doesn't require a background in analytics to run reports

SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate. SMART features for collecting information and its timeline capabilities are highly useful. Then on the contract side, the reporting capabilities are the most valuable. Our use case focuses primarily on post-execution and lifecycle management, so it's essential to be able to report accurately especially compliance-related reports. SMART is easy to use, especially when reporting. It isn't designed for a hardcore analyst. You don't need to have a background in analytics to run reports, which is huge. I realized I hadn't touched too much on the spending side, but we use SMART for all spending analytics, and any commodity manager procurement professional can go in and run a spending report. That was a business decision to restrict who can run reports since that data can be exported and used. But the reporting capabilities are incredibly easy to use.

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Argy Soudi

Senior Procurement Consultant at Ps digital tenders limited

Has connected procurement and contracts efficiently while setup and support still require improvements

Support could be faster for critical issues with SAP Ariba Procurement. When patching happens and new releases come out, it can be hit and miss, though mostly it remains reliable. The on-time response is 99.9999%, but the main issue over the years has been with releases and patching. The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement is not straightforward. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for the council I work with. The personal account login is ready-made and allows landing page adjustments, but the overall software implementation can take forever and requires multiple teams to work on it.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"One of the most valuable features is the opportunity-identification through the spend analytics. Another is around the RFX options to benchmark various pre-qualified vendors that are invited to participate."

"There are additional time savings in managing communications. If you have an open RFP and there are questions, you can manage all of the questions and answers in the thread inside that RFP. All the suppliers will get any notifications that you want them to get, and everything is within the body of the RFP so you don't have to worry about things in email, outside of the system."

"The AI tool definitely has learned from the information we've given it but also from some of the corrections that we've made. It may have auto-applied a classification and then we have gone in and corrected it, given it some feedback. With that, more and more, we are not having to touch the information once it gets processed. It's classifying it from the get-go in the correct category."

"The spend module is really amazing and lightning-fast. It can give even the most novice of analysts access to the information needed and the ability to tweak it the way they want to see it. It has a lot of flexibility."

"Among the most valuable features are the ability to send out purchase orders, create catalogs, and accept invoices through procurement. And the reporting function is robust."

"We operate with three different systems that input data. The fact that GEP consolidates all that information into one place is a big deal for us. It streamlines that data for us."

"SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate."

"The one we use the most is the sourcing module... It's really easy to use. You don't have to train vendors. You can add a new vendor at any time, and that vendor will get an email saying, "You've been selected to participate in our RFP, and you do X to get your ID set up." That works really well."

More GEP SMART pros

"The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval."

"It is a stable solution."

"I like the guided buying features."

"Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly."

"It is one of the best tools in the market."

"Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters."

Cons

"We had a lot of challenges and disagreements with SMART. It's been a long road, for sure, on the contract side. There is a little bit of pushback on their part when we need stuff done. Things aren't done very efficiently. I'm still waiting on some changes that were requested well over a year-and-a-half ago."

"The manuals, especially the ones for the suppliers, are currently available only in English. If these can also be translated into different languages, that would be excellent."

"The loading of the contracts could be a little bit easier. I'd like to see a little bit more of AI brought in, to the point that it's actually reading the contract and automating some things, like expiration dates and renewal terms. That is an area for improvement."

"We definitely have some asks for enhancements. One of the big ones we'd like to see is what we call "drag-and-drop." If I have an email that I want to maintain in the SMART record for whatever reason — for example, it has supporting information in it — I would love to be able to just drop that into the notes and attachments section without having to save it as a PDF and then upload it."

"There are no mechanisms for them to check up on how they refresh their data. So oftentimes, when we go into the tool and we don't see something, we alert them and they say, "Oh, the data hasn't been refreshed, so we'll go ahead and refresh it," and then what we're looking for pops up. We should not have to be the ones to tell them they need to refresh. There should be a mechanism in place for that."

"I want to see continued investment in analytics and reporting."

"We didn't like their dashboard initially, but they responded to that very well. They've given us some customizable dashboards and have also made it so that the dashboards can be exported into PDF and other formats, so that we can share them with the rest of the company... That was a weakness at the beginning, but one that they have responded to adequately and we're really pleased with the result."

"I'd like to see drag-and-drop reporting. They have the old model for reports where you have to click the "run" button. The thing runs and then you have to export it to PowerPoint."

More GEP SMART cons

"Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture."

"They should make the solution more user-friendly."

"I would like the solution to be more automatic."

"I would like to see more reports coming out of Ariba and more insights because it has to work in connection with SAP. So unless I run SAP and Ariba, I have to run. I am not able to see the utility of Ariba."

"Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model."

"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My advice is to think wisely when it comes to estimating the number of licenses that you will require. If you settle on a number too early and you need additional ones, then the extra licenses might be quite expensive."

"If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner."

"The license is expensive."

"The licensing cost depends on the customer."

"It is an expensive solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Energy/Utilities Company

14%

Outsourcing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Energy/Utilities Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about SAP Ariba Procurement?

I like the guided buying features.

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What needs improvement with SAP Ariba Procurement?

Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model. This poses challenges for small and medium enterprises due to the high costs of the cloud offering. There is a need for varying pricing bas...

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What is your primary use case for SAP Ariba Procurement?

The primary use case of Salesforce is in the B2B space. I use it to capture, analyze, summarize, and record customer database and information. It is the de facto standard in the industry for such p...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

GEP SMART

September 2025

Download GEP SMART product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Ariba Procurement

September 2025

Download SAP Ariba Procurement product report

Also Known As

SMART by GEP

Ariba Procurement

Overview

GEP SMART is an AI-powered, cloud-native

software for direct and indirect procurement
that offers comprehensive source-to-pay
functionality in one user-friendly platform,
inclusive of spend analysis, sourcing, contract
management, supplier management,
procure-to-pay, savings project management
and savings tracking, invoicing and other
related functionalities.

GEP Worldwide

SAP Ariba Procurement, is a cloud-based deployment, has an intuitive receipt and reconciliation processes and approvals can be done via mobiles. SAP Ariba Procurement has the following supporting softwares: SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing, SAP Ariba Buying Solution and SAP Ariba Catalog Solution. They help manage suppliers, processes, budgets, approvals, and payments on a global basis. A unique software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, that ensure control and compliance between vendors, contracts, regulations, and buyers.

SAP

Sample Customers

Exxon Chevron Macys

Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)

Buyer's Guide

GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement

September 2025

Free Report: GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement

Find out what your peers are saying about GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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